MediaWiki:Communityhiring-intro

Wikimedia's Community Department is Hiring!

The Community Department collaborates with and serves the broad Wikimedia community -- including readers, donors and editors/contributors -- to encourage the health and growth of Wikimedia communities and the projects they create and manage.

This year, the Community Department will be hiring for a series of key positions. Though the titles and job descriptions will vary, all will involve collaborating and communicating with community stakeholders intensively and publicly, grappling with problems that no one has ever solved before, navigating technological and social challenges and opportunities, and dealing with a high level of complexity and uncertainty. candidates should have extremely high levels of skill and comfort in communication (especially writing), qualitative and quantitative analysis, management and self-management. Candidates who are not already deeply immersed online collaborative communities will have to show an aptitude for quickly gaining deep understanding of our communities' technologies, practices, traditions and culture -- and to become trusted and productive members of the Wikimedia community and movement.

We are looking for candidates from all over the world. Wikimedia Foundation has a policy of hiring without regard to locale. If eventually accepted for a position Wikimedia Foundation will assist visas and some relocation costs.

Read more about what we're looking for below, and if you think you'd be a good match for the Community Department, use the form below to tell us something about yourself. This is not a formal application, it is the first step in an outreach process designed to identify some great candidates for Foundation positions.

Your information will be kept completely confidential and will only be viewed by hiring managers, human resources staff and possibly assisting consultants who are covered by confidentiality agreements. You will receive an email confirmation that we have your submission. Because we have such a small staff, and there may be many responses, we can't guarantee any other response from the Wikimedia foundation beside the confirmation email.

Who we're looking for

We are especially looking for:

• Current Wikimedia community contributors,
• Insightful observers of Wikimedia and other collaborative communities,
• People with specialty skill sets (e.g. statistics, ethnography, and probably a lot other things we've never thought of),
• People belonging to language communities of new and growing Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects,
• People with insight into reaching groups currently underrepresented in Wikimedia contributor communities.

Ideal candidates for positions at Wikimedia Foundation's Community Department:

• Have a passion for online communities, self-organizing systems, open and collaborative enterprises, democratic and consensus based societies, and emergent and participatory governance structures -- and desperately want to see them succeed and prove the cynics wrong.
• Have thought enough about this stuff to have their own opinions and theories on various problems and opportunities facing Wikimedia and

other online communities.

• Are equally strong dealing with qualitative and quantitative knowledge. WMF supports and belongs to a community of deep, brilliant and unique individuals; but there are hundreds of thousands of us, making millions of contributions each week: Therefore we must be able to understand people, communities and cultures in a nuanced, non-linear way, but also be able to work with large quantitative data sets. * Are self-directed, self-motivated, efficient, upbeat, optimistic, and extremely good with people. WMF is building a team of community servants who are members of the Wikimedia communities (both new and long-time members). WMF staff face intense pressures in highly-demanding roles. In many cases, they must solve problems no one has ever solved before. While the WMF team strives to be mutually supportive, it only works when each individual is self-driven to overcome the immense challenges they face.
• Are knowledgeable about software development processes and with database and web technologies.
• Are creative non-linear thinkers who will sometimes fight for seemingly crazy ideas by backing them up with logical argument and data.
• Are systems-thinkers who love to think about workflow and technology systems inside organizations.
• Are multilingual, especially in major world languages and languages with large or growing Wikipedias.
• Have insights and experience reaching larger communities that are underrepresented within the Wikimedia communities of contributors, and within online communities generally.